The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.

Overweening Generalist

Thursday, June 2, 2011

This Blog May Have to Visit the Tiny Island of Hiatus

As some of you may know, Blogger went for a routine fix-it around May 10th and ended up being Out of Order for at least 31 hours, and still many people's blogs or comments were never recovered.

Today, it appears all kinds of problems have arisen for people who blog on Blogger. I don't know if any of you reading this see an inappropriate Google logo with a cartoon robot at the beginning or end of my posts? I do, and the Tech guys at Blogger have no idea how to fix it.

Worse: reading about blogger's other technical problems very recently - suddenly Google's algorithm machine saw their blog as spam and deleted it (many complaints), or people are unable to access their own blog, for no reason. Or their URL now is in someone else's hands? Or: they made a post today and all their previous posts disappeared. On and on.

If you're reading this, then that last atrocity didn't happen to me, but I will tread water for awhile and hope those of you who found my Weirdo Musings worthwhile will hang with it until the Blogger folk fix what seems to be a massive problem. And who knows? Maybe it's a colossal hacker-attack?

4 comments:

Ah, Michael. You have been reading too too much into the help forums. When you see one person with a problem there--then it is one person. There are probably ten or twenty others scratching their heads and saying what's that all about. But thousands and thousands of others are totally oblivious.

If you see two, or ten, or even fifty with the same thing happening, then of course it is concerning. But there are thousands and thousands that are going on blogging oblivious to the problem.

If you see half a dozen blogs being picked up by mistake in an automatic spam review, know that half a thousand actual spammers have been picked up, too. With a review, the mistaken ones will be fairly quickly restored. We won't have to contend with the spammers because they will be gone.

I don't see your robot, but I haven't given up. We will figure it out with some more troubleshooting.

I wonder if anyone sees your robot besides you. I wonder what you have in common with the one other blogger who has reported this problematical robot. We will figure it out. But don't give up on blogging.

About Me

I have furore scribendi which veers into verborrhea. My favorite media (anything that mediates between our sensoria and what is outside our skin) are, in order: books, Internet, CDs (!), DVDs, TV, clothes. I like hoppy beer and New World zins, Indian and Thai food, John Coltrane, JS Bach and heavy metal, the Lakers and Angels, redwood trees, hiking and yoga, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, heretical ideas and pornography. If you want me to write for you, for money, contact rmjon23[at]aol[dot] com. You can also drop a line and say hi, but please be nice 'cuz I'm a delicate creature of Nature.

Sir Isaiah Berlin

"An intellectual is a person who wants ideas to be as interesting as possible. Unless you think the ideas you are discussing are interesting to you, whatever you may believe yourself, the history of ideas will remain a catalogue of unexamined doctrines, terribly boring and unreal."

-Isaiah Berlin, in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo

Leonardo da Vinci

Epitome of Renaissance Man

Athanasius Kircher (c.1600-1680)

The last universal polymath? The last man to know everything? Egyptologist, archaeologist, mathematician, vulcanologist, physicist, biologist.